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Enforcing Different Passwords for Different Sites
- jtm45 14y agoThis sparked an idea for me that I think I'll implement going forward - if you sign up with your email address and password, my server will try to login to your email account with those credentials, and if successful, say something like "hey, did you see that email [snippet of first email in inbox]". I feel this might encourage the user to use a different password.
- sp332 14y agoReading someone's email without permission is a crime. Nice idea though :)
- justjohn 14y agoYou just have to add a clause to the TOS, nobody reads it anyway so you could grant yourself a licence to do anything with their email!
- ken 14y agoAdd some fine print in the user agreement, "During sign-up (only) for service X, I hereby authorize web service X to open my inbox and read one (1) email message, if I choose to provide my email account's password as my password for website X." No longer a federal crime, maybe? Probably still get an angry mob with pitchforks outside your window.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sporksmith 14y agoHa! Clever idea, but I hope you're not serious :). The most likely result would be infuriated users, and quite possibly lawsuits.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- tgrass 14y agoDear god, please let me have the freedom to determine what degree of security I need on a site. If you restrict my password options in anyway I will use your site less.
- fintler 14y agoSo instead of having websites that require "upper, lower, numeric and special" characters, we'll have sites that require "randomly generated word from two years ago that we hope you remember". It's just another constraint that will never be standard and will be near impossible to remember.
- diego 14y agoIf you use a different password for every site, it's a given that you won't be able to remember them. Storing your passwords securely is a different problem.
- sporksmith 14y agoI agree this is a major issue, and in fact was specifically covered in an earlier xkcd (http://xkcd.com/792/ http://xkcd.com/792/) than the one cited (http://xkcd.com/936/ http://xkcd.com/936/). It might be a good idea to enforce non-password reuse, but the proposed solutions seem fairly aggravating. In particular the 'webmaster' solution of requiring inclusion of a fixed string is extremely annoying (oops, sorry users who use cryptographically derived passwords (http://passwordmaker.org/) http://passwordmaker.org/)), and doesn't solve the problem since someone with your "main" password can probably guess the "derived" password (e.g., the main password with the mandatory substring appended to the end). My solution as a user is to just use a password manager. I use clipperz(http://clipperz.com/ http://clipperz.com/), but there's plenty others out there. * Edited to remove markdown-style links. Forgot it wasn't supported here.
- diego 14y agoThe point is that the mandatory substring is random and unique to you. The problem with using a password manager is that it implies that you're already savvy enough about the issue. Most people have no idea such thing exists. How could you enforce the usage of a password manager?
- sporksmith 14y ago> The point is that the mandatory substring is random and unique to you. Ah, that's a little better. I still think the security gained is not enough to justify how much of a usability problem this could be, though. Assuming the per-user fixed substring is a secret, you're basically assigning the user's password (though giving them an option to strengthen it with their own 'root' password). If it's not secret then not much security is gained. > How could you enforce the usage of a password manager? I don't know of a good way. Although if every site starting assigning (part of) the password, as above, I suppose that would do it.
- georgemcbay 14y agoEven if the substring is random and unique to a user it'll still be easy for an attacker to guess which part of the password that is, just like it is usually obvious which of the recaptcha words are the known and which is the unknown. eg: mysillypasssoqpword Yeah, I think I can guess what happened there.
- baak 14y agoI'm no expert, but why does this have to be done on the password level? Why can't we just assign usernames to our own sites, and force people to login with those? I know that's incredibly annoying for a user, but it would at least guarantee the user credentials for your site are unique from any other site.
- PeterisP 14y agoThis would mean that there are two "passwords" that I have to remember - the userid and the actual password. Chances are, your site isn't worth it to remember a new uid. (I counted that only 5 out of my 150 stored account passwords are for something worth remembering anything at all.) If you are important (say, paypal or gmail) - do two factor authentification. If you are not - don't bother me. Even creating an account is already more effort than most sites are worth.
- MiguelHudnandez 14y agoIt is equally obnoxious to generate a random string of garbage and: * insist it's the username, * insist it is in the password somewhere, or * make them type the string in a third logon field It adds friction to the process in order to solve a problem that is not "ours" to solve. An option with less friction would be to ask them to choose a picture from 16 candidates. The 16 candidate photos would need to be generated from the username to avoid the ability to refresh the page and find the persistent image. Each image could have the random characters associated with it to be used as an addendum to the salt, or for whatever purposes on the back end which the random characters are supposed to accomplish.
- gms 14y agoThis will never work for normal people. For everyone else, there are programs like LastPass and 1Password that make this easy.
- georgemcbay 14y ago"Now, one fine day somecrappysite.com gets hacked. The next time you visit, the web page has malicious code that sends your password in plaintext to someone. There go your Paypal funds, your Facebook account, your online life." What an optimist! somecrappysite.com was probably storing your password in plaintext to begin with and it probably got pulled from the database long before you logged in again. Having said that, this is an absolutely terrible solution for real-world usage because it inhibits people who are already security savvy from using better solutions like Stanford pwdhash or similar methods.
- diego 14y agoRight, but those people are the one percent. How do we help the vast majority?
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- georgemcbay 14y agoOther than education and pushing them to use a secure password manager, I'm not sure, but the solution shouldn't involve breaking existing and secure systems which are widely used even if only by a minority of users.
- diego 14y ago"widely used by a minority" <- you made my point.
- georgemcbay 14y agoNot really. The proposed solution adds little to no real world security (see my other post about how easy it would be to guess which part is the random one which makes this system not useful unless almost all sites use it, which will never happen). Given little to no real world security gain from the described system, it certainly isn't worth breaking an existing system that works just fine and securely even if for just a minority of people.
- wulczer 14y agoI recommend that everyone who read this contemplates this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3889435 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3889435 (AKA the voice of reason)
- mudil 14y agoAfter Gawker was hacked (and my account with it), I have created a website that tells average folks how to solve these issues: http://www.passmix.com/ http://www.passmix.com/. It's not a perfect solution, but it's way better than the same password for different websites.
- anonycoward 14y agoFrom what I've read this (and methods like it) seems to be a common way to generate passwords. This seems to be a somewhat weak implementation though - imagine you used this method with the same base everywhere, and 2 sites were hacked, let's called them InLinked and Kergaw. Using the examples from passmix.com with base 'house cat' I might end up with: 'housei!n8cat' and 'housek!e6cat'. Say I'm targeting you specifically, I look at these two passwords, and I see that they both follow 'houseX!Y#cat' format. It's only a moment longer before I've a good guess at how the password is constructed, and then try it against your email. Once I've cracked your email I can just use the forgot password feature of any other site to reset your password there. It would be quite easy to write a script to detect the similarity with the two passwords (9 characters in common, same positions, same length = 12). You should never use the same password across sites, nor should you use the same password system unless that system is secure. Assuming you can keep your algorithm for password generation private, passing this through a one-way hash function might then strengthen your password a bit (at least a hacker couldn't easily visually derive your password algorithm, or that you are using one) but this still isn't perfect. Generally it's not a good idea to tell people how to construct passwords unless you're an expert in cryptography. I'm not, so please don't take any of this as advice on how to construct a password. It's advice on how not to, if anything.
- cheald 14y agoBig ol' hole here: You can't identify web apps by domain. Are you going to tell me I can't use "password123" as my password on store.foo.com and secure.foo.com (when they both point to the same database and the same user record)? Are you going to assume that passwords may be shared across all TLDs? (so I can re-use passwords on multiple separate apps on the same TLD) It's a nice idea, but in practice, it would drive you insane because the web is not a nice uniform entity where everyone plays by a pre-arranged set of rules. Just use LastPass and let it autogenerate passwords for you. It's stupid easy, and super effective. LastPass will even tell you how many sites you're using the same passwords on! ( https://lastpass.com/index.php?securitychallenge=1&fromwebsite=1&lpnorefresh=1 https://lastpass.com/index.php?securitychallenge=1&fromw... )
- diego 14y agoNobody gets the point. The point is that you can't force 99% of the people to use something. What I advocate is enforcement on the part of the browser and / or sites. If the user has the choice to be lazy, no solution works.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- drivebyacct2 14y agoI cry everytime I read these threads on HN. I've never seen such stubborness than people desperately convinced that they need to be able to memorize their passwords, or that password managers are the devil. I'll say it again, just use a password manager. It generates random, complex passwords. It memorizes them for you. It pre-populates forms. They are locally encrypted and can be synced by themselves or with other tools. They can even be protected with two factor auth. My mother uses LastPass. So can you.
- diego 14y agoSee all my other comments on this thread. Why does your mother use LastPass? How did she learn about it? How about the other 99% of the people? How do you make them use LastPass? This is not about us.
- res0nat0r 14y ago> Tell the user: your password must contain the following word: “hzru” Enforcing this kind of thing on the masses won't make for stronger passwords, it will just have them opening up notepad.exe and saving this sites too-hard-to-remember-because-it-has-too-many-rules password on ~/Desktop/logins.txt
- diego 14y agoNow you'd have to prove that having passwords stored in a file is worse than massive password leaks. I suspect that it isn't. People already carry laptops with browsers that save passwords automatically. Losing your laptop already implies a password-change-fest.
- thedufer 14y agoAre you implying that browsers save passwords in cleartext? A quick search indicates that all major browsers encrypt passwords to user accounts, and some give the option of a master password as well.
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- ricardobeat 14y agoThis is not any safer. One day your linkedin account is hacked, revealing your strong_linkedin_password. How hard is it to guess the facebook one? There were plenty of passwords like this in the recent LinkedIn leak.
- joeguilmette 14y agoI am the only person I know who uses a unique, memorable and strong password for every site I use. I store all of them in my head. I have a base password and I add the first several characters of the site to the middle. For example: Facebook - sdfb231a2 Hacker News - sdyc231a2 Yahoo - sdya231a2 For strong passwords I can add a suffix to further strengthen the password. PayPal - sdpa231a2a4 I use the same suffix for all "strong" passwords. If a site requires a capital letter I always capitalize the first letter. I've gone to create an account with a site, been told I already have an account and I get the password in 1 guess because I'm so consistent with creating them. I don't know why everyone doesn't do this.
- paulgb 14y agoThat seems like what SuperGenPass (http://supergenpass.com/ http://supergenpass.com/) does, but with more effort and easier to break. Essentially, with SGP you type a master password into the password box and click the button in your browser (you don't have to install anything, just bookmark the javascript). It uses a one-way hash to create a unique password based on the domain.
- joeguilmette 14y agoI guess, but my method only uses my brain. I can access my accounts using an internet cafe, someone else's iPod Touch, etc.
- jasonkester 14y agoWhat do you do when you log in to your bank and they tell you that your password has expired and that you need to create a new unique 6-8 character password with exactly one capital letter and one number but no special characters? And that it can't contain any part of any of your old passwords? I guess the same thing you'd do if you ran across a site with this well intentioned but terrible idea: write it down or email it to yourself. The only sane thing you can do as a developer is let users chose any password they like, regardless of how insecure you think it is. Store it correctly and that's the end of your involvement. Let your users do what they want, or you'll just make things worse.
- tgrass 14y agoI have an algorithm for creating unique passwords. Here is the result for HackerNews: kcahu3602122@#)* here for Facebook: ecafu3602122@#)^ (I can create them practically in my sleep. The algorithm is personal and easy) To determine the algorithm, one would need plain text from two sites and be able to match them. Now, everytime a site limits my freedom to creating the password I want (assuming I can't provide my own security - by demanding a capital, a number, a this a that) I default to the same password. If they get one site with my simple pass, they get all the sites on which I use it. When you put constraints on my password creation, you make my online life MORE insecure, not less. Free my password. Don't tell me what I can and can't do. Offer a full page of help describing to those who don't care what they should do. But don't force them.
- vicaya 14y agoThe desire to enforce unique password across sites is understood. You might as well advocate all browsers to implement a builtin password manager a la LastPass and a protocol to auto-gen a password (by the site to enforce cross-site uniqueness) to be managed by the password manager. Imagine zero password fiddling signups! Force a per site password policy on end users other than length is super annoying. The worst kind are those who restrict you to use only alpha-numeric passwords. Down with manual password policies!
- fluxon 14y agoBecause browsers already optionally store passwords, adding the "password same" warning would be quite a welcome feature (or add-on), for me anyways (in mobile browsers too). I advocate the use of password managers, but they don't offer "password same" warnings either. My point: it's a best-practice feature option which should be implemented widely. People can turn it off if they want.